USN-90-1: Imagemagick vulnerability

3 March 2005

Imagemagick vulnerability

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Releases

Details

Tavis Ormandy discovered a format string vulnerability in ImageMagick's file
name handling. Specially crafted file names could cause a program using
ImageMagick to crash, or possibly even cause execution of arbitrary code.

Since ImageMagick can be used in custom printing systems, this also might lead
to privilege escalation (execute code with the printer spooler's privileges).
However, Ubuntu's standard printing system does not use ImageMagick, thus there
is no risk of privilege escalation in a standard installation.

ImageMagick is also commonly used by web frontends; if these accept image
uploads with arbitrary file names, this could also lead to remote privilege
escalation.

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Ubuntu Pro provides ten-year security coverage to 25,000+ packages in Main and Universe repositories, and it is free for up to five machines.

Learn more about Ubuntu Pro

Update instructions

The problem can be corrected by updating your system to the following package versions:

Ubuntu 4.10
  • imagemagick -
  • libmagick6 -

In general, a standard system update will make all the necessary changes.

References

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Further reading